Re: The Emacs Calculator and calendar

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2012 15:07:05 -0700
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Cc: jay.p.belanger@gmail.com, Edward Reingold <reingold@iit.edu>,
> 	emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Almost nobody who writes about ancient history specifies dates in the
> calendars that were used at the time.

Maybe in English-speaking countries.  Try reading Russian history
books, and you will see old dates right up to 1918.  That's why it's
called "the October Revolution", although it happened on Nov 7th.  To
this day, Jan 14 is "the Old New Year day" for many people in Russia
and other countries.  The Russian Church is still using the Julian
calendar, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_New_Year.  So
much for "almost nobody".

> It's true that it's also common practice to use the Julian calendar
> when talking about events that occurred before 1752 in British-contolled
> territory, and to use the Gregorian calendar for later events in that
> territory.  But this is a special case, and it does not generalize well
> elsewhere.

See above.  There are other special cases, some generalization is
possible.